Roadside Crosses

do you know somebody who could get it running and take a look at her files?”
    “Sure. Me.”
    “Oh, I thought you said you weren’t that much of a tech anymore.”
    “That’s not tech, not by today’s standards.” He smiled again. “It’s like rotating your tires on a car. Only I need a couple of tools.”
    “We don’t have a lab here. Nothing as sophisticated as you probably need.”
    “Well, that depends. I see you collect shoes.” Her closet door was open and Boling must’ve glancedinside, where a dozen pairs sat, more or less ordered, on the floor—for those nights when she went out after work, without stopping at home. She gave a laugh.
    Busted.
    He continued, “How ’bout personal care appliances?”
    “Personal care?”
    “I need a hair dryer.”
    She chuckled. “Sadly, all my beauty aids are at home.”
    “Then we better go shopping.”

Chapter 8
    JON BOLING NEEDED a bit more than a hair dryer, as it turned out. Though not much.
    Their shopping spree had yielded a Conair, a set of miniature tools and a metal box called an enclosure—a three-by-five-inch rectangle from which sprouted a wire that ended in a USB plug.
    These items now sat on Dance’s coffee table in her office at the CBI.
    Boling surveyed Tammy Foster’s designer laptop. “I can take it apart? I’m not going to screw up any evidence, am I?”
    “It’s been dusted for prints. All we found were Tammy’s. Go ahead and do what you want—she’s not a suspect. Besides, she lied to me, so she’s in no position to complain.”
    “Pink,” he said again, as if this was a shocking breach of propriety.
    He turned the machine over and, with a tiny Phillips-head screwdriver, had the panel off the back in a few minutes. He then extracted a small metal-and-plastic rectangle.
    “The hard drive,” he explained. “By next year this’ll be considered huge. We’re going to flash memoryin central processing units. No hard drives—no moving parts at all.” The subject seemed to excite him but he sensed a lecture was a digression inappropriate at the moment. Boling fell silent and examined the drive closely. He didn’t seem to wear contacts; Dance, who’d worn glasses since girlhood, had a mild attack of eye envy.
    The professor then gently rattled the drive beside his ear. “Okay.” He set it on the table.
    “Okay?”
    He grinned, unpacked the hair dryer, plugged it in and wafted a stream of balmy heat over the drive. “Shouldn’t be long. I don’t think it’s wet but we can’t take the chance. Electricity and water equal uh-oh.”
    With his free hand he sipped the coffee. He mused, “We professors’re very envious of the private sector, you know. ‘Private sector’—that’s Latin for ‘actually making money.’” He nodded at the cup. “Take Starbucks. . . . Coffee was a pretty good idea for a franchise. I keep looking for the next big one. But all I could think of were things like House O’ Pickles and Jerky World. Beverages’re the best, but all the good ones’re taken.”
    “Maybe a milk bar,” Dance suggested. “You could call it Elsie’s.”
    His eyes brightened. “Or how ’bout ‘Just An-Udder Place.’ ”
    “That was really bad,” she said as they shared a brief laugh.
    When he finished drying the hard drive he slipped it into the enclosure. He then plugged the USB connection into his own laptop, which was a somber gray, apparently the shade computers should be.
    “I’m curious what you’re doing.” She was watching his sure fingers pound the keys. Many of the letters were worn off. He didn’t need to see them to type.
    “The water would’ve shorted out the computer itself, but the hard drive should be okay inside. I’m going to turn it into a readable drive.” After a few minutes he looked up and smiled. “Nope, it’s good as new.”
    Dance scooted her chair closer to his.
    She glanced at the screen and saw that Windows Explorer was reading Tammy’s hard drive as “Local Disk (G).”
    “It’ll have everything on it—her emails, the websites she’s browsed, her favorite places, records of her instant messages. Even deleted data. It’s not encrypted or password-protected—which, by the way, tells me that her parents are very uninvolved in her life. Kids whose folks keep a close eye on them learn to use all kinds of tricks for privacy. Which I, by the way, am pretty good at cracking.” He unplugged the disk from his computer and handed it and the cable to her.